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Monthly Archives: June 2016

I am a huge Disney fan. I’d go way more often if my husband didn’t mind me spending the money, but he does mind, so I have to compromise. 🙂

I was pretty horrified to read about the toddler who was attacked by an alligator at the shoreline of the Seven Seas Lagoon at Walt Disney World. I looked at photos of the area where it happened and I can absolutely see myself walking along the waters edge there. It looks just like a beach. There are even lounge chairs for people to relax in. There are of course “no swimming” signs and alligator warning signs and if you are from Florida you probably know to take the alligator signs pretty seriously. Even so, I lived in Florida for 4 years next to a lake with an alligator in it and I still think I would have walked along that shoreline.

Disney is really good at what they do and one of the things that they do is make people feel very safe. Surely nothing could go wrong at Disney, right? There are plainsclothes security officers all over the place. If I lose my kid in the crowd, Disney will do everything in their power to find them. When I visited Disney in April I left my phone and wallet inside the Space Mountain rollercoaster car I was sitting in and didn’t realize it until after the car had left to go back to the beginning of the ride. Disney responded quickly and efficiently and I got my belongings back.

I don’t think it’s the parents fault that their child was attacked by an alligator. They weren’t swimming in the lake, the area looks like a beach where you can safely walk along the shoreline, and it was dark. They probably wouldn’t have been able to see an alligator in there.

Now I’m wondering if Disney is going to respond to this by making that beach area less accessible, or killing all of the alligators in the lake or something else. I wonder if the second option is even feasible. Probably not, as alligators are endangered. I hope there’d be an outcry if their solution was to keep the lagoon alligator-free by killing them all. I think they should either have a curfew in that area, so that you can’t go on the beach part after dark, or have a large barrier between the beach and the rest of the resort, like a fence… or both. They could lock the fence gates at night so you aren’t in danger of being attacked by an alligator, which I imagine is hard to see in the water at night.

I’m not going to lie. My husband and I found it a little difficult to be completely vegan in Thailand. If you are a raw vegan, fruitarian, or are okay just eating fruits and veggies all day, then Thailand is an amazing place for food. There is an abundance of fruit and amazing variety.

My husband and I are not those kind of vegans though. We stick to a vegan diet because we care about the environment and the way animals are treated. We eat anything as long as it’s vegan. I have tried being 80% raw before in the past but found it difficult and time consuming. I also just didn’t have any energy to do anything. In Thailand, however, we couldn’t eat out at tourist vegetarian restaurants every day because we needed to stick to a food budget. It would get expensive to eat out every day for a month. Especially since tourist restaurants are a lot more expensive than getting street food in Thailand and a tourist restaurant is where one would most likely find a meal that can be easily veganized.

The hardest thing about being vegan in Thailand for us was avoiding fish sauce. We learned that Thai people don’t cook with salt and use fish sauce to salt food instead. So, it is basically in every single dish. Walking around anywhere in Thailand, you will most likely smell fish sauce. So, we did eat a few meals that contained fish sauce.

We also found it kind of difficult to find instant noodles at 7-11 that didn’t contain any animals in them. So, we did eat a few instant noodle meals that were not vegan/vegetarian.

Our last week in Thailand we arrived in Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai was by far the easiest place to be vegan. We found a restaurant called May Kaidee’s vegetarian/vegan restaurant and pretty much ate there every single day, budget be damned. It was the best restaurant we had eaten at during our trip. I’m pretty sure I gained 2 lbs that week.

We bought the cookbook and took the cooking class and I am excited to try out the recipes once I am over my cold.

Here are pictures of some of the food we ate there:

So, definitely, if you are heading to Thailand make your way to Chiang Mai. Bangkok has a May Kaidee too, but I liked the vibe at the Chiang Mai restaurant more. The food was excellent at both locations though.

So after over 40 hours of travelling I’m finally home from our trip to Thailand. Haven’t updated my blog since before I left but I would like to start writing regularly again. Sometime at around hour 20 of our journey back I started to get sick. It started with a runny nose and progressed to both a runny nose and a sore throat. I currently feel miserable. I’m confined to my little corner in the living room so that I avoid getting everyone else in the house sick. Can’t make my own meals, or do anything really to avoid contamination. Last time I was here at my mother in law’s I was also sick and everyone ended up getting sick too. It sucked.